Do you think we would be much better off if climate change had been discovered 10 years earlier, but the state of technology had remained the same until now?

Answers

In some respects yes and others no. I think that discovering climate change 10 years earlier would have helped gain more support for minimizing our wastes and recycling. We did not need a lot of technology to understand that reducing packaging, composting, recycling and reusing items would cut energy costs of manufacturing. We also did not need a lot of technology to come up with the ideas of using grey water and reducing our driving to eliminate some of the emissions we are producing. Lastly, we might be a lot farther along with climate change bills and may have had more restrictions in place that would encourage more efficient thinking when constructing manufacturing plants.

However, with the technology being the same, we would probably be at the same place in terms of wind, solar and other renewable energy. We would also be in the same place in terms of trying to reduce our oil needs, so there would still be quite a ways to go.

I believe that computers were not advanced enough ten years ago to progress the technological world enough to make good advances in green-living. For instance, it was not possible to create efficient electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, etc. Also the power grid may not have been able to handle all of this (it still may not). Also we now have efficient lighting. The only thing we could have started was merely recycling more.